I spent a week at a Monastery outside of Florence with the theory that isolated in my monastic cell, I would have a highly focused space to work and think. Instead, I found myself becoming more lethargic with each passing day. I wrote this to help myself understand why.

After bitter defeat in the Napoleonic wars, Napoleon was forced to abdicate the throne. Instead of execution, he was banished to the island of Elba, off the coast of Tuscany. It was a comfortable exile, with multiple villas and an imperial court of hundreds of staff. He was granted all the wealth needed to live like a provincial lord, able to host decadent banquets or indulge in women and wine until he died.

But Napoleon was no provincial lord. After ten months, he decided to leave Elba and rally 1,000 men on a march to Paris. Along the way, thousands more soldiers joined him, including a battalion sent to stop him. Within 19 days, the King had fled Paris and Napoleon reclaimed power. 

We all end up on Elba at points in our lives. As a kid, we experienced summer break, two months of warm weather and lethargy. As adults, you may have experienced remote work, full days of unstructured time. We’ve all spent time sequestered in our own worlds, with almost no one telling us what to do or when to do it. 

The vast majority of people do not become sharper on Elba. They soften. The kid on summer break ends up playing Minecraft for hours everyday, in between watching Mr. Beast videos. The remote worker rolls out of bed at 10:45am and hops on the all hands call while wearing pajama pants. After a numbing and pleasure seeking yet unpleasurable day, you go to sleep and repeat the next day.

This is the paradox of Elba: being free is not always freeing. Remove deadlines, peers, rituals, and the quiet pressure of a world in motion, and many people do not rise to the occasion. They sink to their appetites. Human beings are not naturally inclined toward disciplined greatness in a vacuum. We are creatures of momentum, imitation, and environment. It matters that other people are waking up early. It matters that trains are running, offices are filling, classes are beginning, and the city is already asking something of you before you have fully opened your eyes. Structure animates us.

During COVID, there was a lot of murmuring about the end of the centralized workforce, that the future of corporate staffing would be distributed and remote. It was a logical argument: for a job like software engineering, where much of the work product is digital, why spend ten times more hiring staff in San Francisco instead of equally competent remote workers in Bangalore and Warsaw? Yet today, the number of economically significant remote companies which are growing revenue is in the single digits. 

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My hypothesis is that remote work doesn’t work because every remote employee lives on Elba. It’s impossible to instill culture and intensity over Zoom; To share energy cold calling in a sales bullpen or stay up late together shipping a critical product feature. Compounding culture exists everywhere, beyond office work. There’s a reason why artists coalesce in Bushwick and philosophers gather in the Left Bank. In certain places, pursuit of greatness is the default lifestyle instead of an exercise of discipline. Becoming great on Elba is possible, but really, really hard.

If you find yourself on Elba, you have a responsibility to yourself to escape. Elba isn’t always an island, it can be a hometown that has grown too small for your ambitions, or a job that is comfortable but no longer demanding. It’s any place where nothing is expected of you, and so you slowly stop expecting anything of yourself.

Seek out environments that demand something of you: where standards are visible, where effort is mirrored, where idleness feels out of place. Because the real danger of Elba is not that it is unpleasant. It is that it is pleasant enough to stay. And if you stay too long, you forget what it felt like to be in pursuit of something difficult and worthwhile. Napoleon did not leave because Elba was unbearable. He left because it was insufficient.